foodday OCTOBER 24, 2012

6 FOOD DAY PRINCIPLES

Protect the environment and farm animals by reforming factory farms

It's time to reform factory farms and make life better for workers, animals, and nearby residents. The size and location of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, should be strictly regulated to reduce air and water pollution. Consumers can accelerate reforms by purchasing less meat, eggs, and dairy foods from factory farms.

Each year, filling the more than 300 million American stomachs requires about 9 billion chickens and turkeys, 114 million pigs, and 34 million cattle. The vast majority of those animals are no longer produced on picture-book pastures, but on huge "confined animal feeding operations" (CAFOs), or factory farms. A single egg farm might house well over a million hens, and a large feedlot up to 50,000 cattle. Those operations cause a multitude of problems:

• Livestock produce some three trillion pounds of manure annually. Mountains and lakes of excrement pollute the air and water.
• Antibiotics added to animal feed may lead to antibiotic-resistant infections in humans.
• Producing corn and soybeans for animal feed requires prodigious quantities of water, fertilizer, energy to produce that fertilizer, and pesticides, as well as vast amounts of land.
• Over-fertilization of farm fields results in polluted rivers and streams, as well as "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay.
• Factory farms, slaughterhouses, and processing plants all too often treat both the workers and the animals inhumanely.

The 10 billion animals (mostly chickens) raised and slaughtered for food every year is a lot of animals, and they are often raised in unspeakable ways. Chickens raised for meat are selectively bred to grow so fast that many of them have difficulty even walking more than a few steps for the latter portion of their brief lives. The birds used for egg production are crammed into cages with several other birds, each having less space than a sheet of letter-sized paper. Many dairy cows have their tails cut off without painkillers and generally never eat a blade of grass in their lives. The high-grain diet fed to cattle in feedlots is unsuitable for grass-eating ruminants and leads to illnesses. In addition, animals may be fed sewage sludge and "poultry litter" containing ground-up manure, feathers, and spilled feed collected from poultry house floors. And breeding pigs are confined to gestation cages in which they cannot even turn around for the great majority of their lives. The inhumane treatment of animals occurs, in part, because farm animals are exempt from federal animal welfare laws that protect laboratory mice and rats.

Producing animals in large, efficient-appearing factory farms may keep down the costs at the supermarket, but that practice comes at a real cost to human health, the environment, and the farm animals themselves. Be it the high-fat feedlot beef, stinking mountains of manure, polluted waterways, or mistreatment of the animals, factory farms are degrading our quality of life:

• Grain-fed beef is high in fat, which promotes heart disease. And it appears that eating any beef and pork, especially processed meats, increases the risk of colorectal cancer.
• Harmful gases—methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and nitrogen oxides— from livestock and their manure are toxic or foul-smelling. Those gases are some of the largest sources of air pollution in the United States. Cattle account for 20 percent of U.S. emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
• Manure ponds can leak into and contaminate waterways them with disease-causing bacteria, and they also release ammonia that kills aquatic life and contaminates air. In Nebraska alone, animals produce about as much fecal waste as is produced by the eight million people in New York City.
• Natural resources: On average, about one-third of a pound of fertilizer, 1,900 gallons of water, and seven pounds of grain are required to produce one pound of beef. Producing feed for animals puts pressure on U.S. farmland, where most of the available arable land is already used. About two-thirds of all grain ends up as feed for livestock at home or abroad. The production of enormous quantities of chemical fertilizer and long-distance shipping of foods represents a huge carbon footprint.
• Water is polluted from overuse of the roughly 22 billion pounds of chemical fertilizer applied to farmland annually. Half of those chemicals are used to grow feed grains for animals. Runoff of fertilizers and manure from fields into the Mississippi basin carries nitrogen and phosphorous into the Gulf of Mexico, where those high nutrient loads result each year in an oxygen-poor, 8,500-square-mile "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Irrigation accounts for 80 percent of all the fresh water used, competing with the needs of people and industry. Much of the water used to irrigate feed crops in the Great Plains states, from South Dakota to Texas, comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, the world's largest underground lake. Although groundwater is renewable, it refills slowly, and some experts estimate that the Aquifer will run dry in 30 years.
• Soil erosion is irreversible damage caused when plants do not hold the nutrient-rich topsoil. Its loss reduces soil fertility and requires increased use of chemical fertilizers. Raising expansive monocultures of corn and soybeans adds to the problem. An average acre of land in the United States loses five tons of soil each year, blown away by the wind or carried away by water.

Fortunately, on the animal-welfare front, Americans have been demanding better treatment of farm animals. Seven states—California, Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Maine, and Oregon—have recently passed modest measures to phase out certain kinds of extreme confinement of animals.

President Barack Obama was elected on a platform presenting a new Rural Agenda that promised to enhance air and water pollution controls on CAFOs and reform the industrial food production system in favor of smaller farmers. It's time to act! State and federal governments need to pass and enforce laws to protect workers and animals. Consumers can help by eating less animal products and products grown in humane, less-polluting ways. Replacing animal products with plant-based foods (beans, vegetables, whole grains, and fruit) would reduce the number of animals that need to be raised and slaughtered and probably lead to better health.

This is what we could do:

• Reduce confinement agriculture by increasing the amount of space provided to animals and reducing the numbers of animals in CAFOs. Enforce or broaden federal laws designed to reduce toxic air and water pollution from CAFOs.
• Require that farm animals be treated better—bar the caging of layer hens, severe confinement of pigs in gestation crates, calves in veal crates, and such painful mutilations as tail-docking and hot-iron branding.
• Eat less meat, more plants! The average American eats 30 chickens, half a pig, and a tenth of a cow each year. If you do eat animal products, choose organically produced foods or buy free-range poultry and pork, eggs from cage-free hens, and grass-fed beef.

If you want to know more:
Compassion in World Farming
Environmental Working Group
Farm Aid
GRACE
The Humane Society of the U.S.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production

Food Day was created by Center for Science in the Public Interest